WordPress for Business: 5 Essential Plugins for Your WordPress Site

WordPress is a powerful piece of software in its own right. But when you add the power of plugins to your business' WordPress website, there's pretty much nothing you can't get WordPress to do. There are plugins (which are pieces of software you can easily add to your WordPress site) that reduce spam, improve the security of your website, help with search engine optimization, add social media functionality to your site, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

With over 9000 plugins to choose from on WordPress.org, there's no shortage of choices out there. The question becomes which are the essential plugins you need for your WordPress for business website. As a shortcut to get you started, here are 5 plugins I install on pretty much every WordPress site I set up.

1. Google XML Sitemaps

A sitemap is a document which has information about all the pages on a website and how they all link together. Sitemaps are important for search engine optimization purposes because they help Google and the other search engines index your site better. This plugin takes all the work out of creating a sitemap. It automatically creates one every time you update your site with new content and then will notify the major search engines that there's new content for them to index.

2. All In One SEO Pack

With pretty much any business website, you're going to want it to rank as highly as possible in the search engines so your prospects will find your site before your competitors. The plugin will take care of a lot of the optimization required for your website right out of the box. Simply install the All In One SEO Pack and it automatically starts working to make the search engines love your website. For those of you who may be more advanced in the ways of SEO, you can make changes and tweak settings in the plugin to suit your purposes. (There are some themes, like the Thesis Theme for WordPress, that have SEO functionality already built in which makes this plugin redundant).

3. Contact Form 7

Would you like to give visitors to your site and easy way to contact you? Especially on a business website, that's a no brainer. You can just provide an email address or phone number, but you can make things even easier for site visitors by having a form on the site that they can use to contact you. Contact Form 7 makes creating and placing a form on your site a breeze. You can drag and drop fields to create a form with the fields you want in the order you want them. From there it's just a matter of copying a very short code and placing it on the page of your site where the form belongs. No programming necessary!

4. Google Analytics for WordPress

For any website, it's important to know how many people are visiting your site, what pages are they visiting, what keywords they're using to find you and more. This plugin helps you easily do that. You'll need to register for a free Google Analytics account first. Then enter your Google Analytics account ID into this plugin and you'll start collecting more data about your site's traffic than you'll know what to do with.

5. WordPress Mobile Edition

Mobile is huge. As more and more smartphones pour into the market, more consumers are using their phones to surf the web. If you don't have a website that can be easily viewed on a mobile phone's browser, you may be losing out on potential business. This plugin makes sure that doesn't happen. Once installed, the plugin detects mobile browsers and gives your site/blog a mobile-friendly interface so it looks great on mobile devices.

Adam Kreitman is a Saint Louis online marketing consultant. While he is not a designer, he got tired of seeing small business clients with overpriced, poorly designed websites so he started helping clients develop sites using WordPress. To get the word out to a larger audience he started a website which provides tips, video tutorials and resources for using WordPress for business.

7 Big Reasons To Create Your Small Business Website With WordPress

Which of these choices would you prefer?

A website that involves custom programming costing $3000 or more, requires a knowledge of complex programming languages in order to make even simple changes to the content, and requires a complete redesign (again costing thousands of dollars) if you decide the look is outdated?

Or a website built on free software that has thousands of free add-ons available to make it do pretty much anything you want, an easy-to-use interface that you can use to update the content yourself without any programming knowledge and hundreds of professionally designed, quality templates you can use to change the appearance of the site at the drop of a hat?

No brainer, right?

If you aren't familiar with it, an introduction to WordPress is in order.

WordPress, while originally developed for blogging, is now an amazingly powerful Content Management System that you can use to a design highly functional and professional website for your small business.

Here are 7 benefits to using WordPress for a small business website:

1. It costs nothing! Not one penny! WordPress is available for download at WordPress.org at no cost - you won't even have to give up your email address. To host a WordPress site yourself, however, you will need to find a hosting company. That's generally not free. But it's not expensive either. For just $5 - $10 a month you can host your WordPress site at any number of quality web host providers. Many of them include Fantastico with your hosting plan which is software that lets you install WordPress in just a few clicks without even having to download the software.

2. Ease of Use. Besides being easy to install, WordPress is very easy to use. Sure, if you're technically challenged, there will be a learning curve in using WordPress. But there are plenty of tutorials around on the web to help you. And once you get the hang of things it's quite easy to add or update content - it's basically like using a word processing program like Microsoft Word. You don't need to have a programming bone in your body to successfully maintain a WordPress site.

3. Themes. Think of a theme as a template. It will change the look and feel of your WordPress site. It can also change the behind-the-scenes workings of your site to provide additional functionality. You can choose from thousands of different themes - some are free, some you have to pay for. And if you can't find one that quite suits your requirements, you can hire a designer to create a custom theme for your WordPress site.

Using themes you can pretty much get whatever look and feel you want for your WordPress site. And if you get tired of one theme, simply install another and you can instantly and completely change the look of your site - without having to touch the core content already on the site.

4. Plugins. Plugins are software the extend the capabilities of WordPress to do pretty much anything you want. Using plugins, you can track site visits, add social bookmarking to your site, automate backups of your site, fight spam, create contact forms, improve site security and a lot more. And, with few exceptions, the plugins are absolutely free.

5. Search Engine Optimization (SEO). If you want to get some major SEO-love from Google and the other search engines, WordPress is for you. The search engines simply love WordPress. If you add on a few of the available WordPress SEO plugins, then you'll really be cooking!

6. Technical Support. WordPress does not offer tech support for you to email or call with your questions. However, have no fear, there are still a ton of options for you if you have an issue you need addressed. You can turn to the forum on WordPress.org, which is a very active community of WordPress users who are always willing to help those having problems with the software. In addition, there are a bunch of other websites, message boards and blogs that you can turn to for advice. There are also plenty of WordPress experts for hire to assist you. Whatever issue you may encounter, help is always close at hand.

7. Control. Hosting your own WordPress website puts you in control of your web presence. Need to update your content, add new posts or pages? You can easily do it yourself. Want to update the appearance of your site? Find a new Theme, upload it, activate it and you're done. Don't like the hosting company you're using? Find another and move your site - there are plenty of good hosting companies around.

There you have seven reasons to strongly consider WordPress to power your small business' website. To be certain, there are definitely situations where having a custom programmed website created by a reputable, qualified professional is the way to go.

But for the majority of small business owners that I come across, a basic, professional looking site, maybe with a blog, maybe not will do the trick. If that's you, I'd check out WordPress. With it's combination of flexibility, functionality and cost, it's tough to match.

The Amazing Online Marketing Opportunity That is Facebook PPC

Did you know Facebook has a pay per click advertising program?

It's probably one of the best opportunities available right now for those who want to market their products and services. I recently wrote a post on my main blog about Facebook PPC if you want to know why it's such a big deal and how to take advantage of it.

YouTube Secrets to Get More Visitors To Your Website

A lot of small business are using videos to promote their products and services.

And with good reason. Video is a highly effective way of attracting prospects to your website.

Unfortunately many small business owners just throw their videos up on YouTube but do little to optimize them.

On our sister blog, we've posted some YouTube secrets to help small business owners increase the flow of traffic from their YouTube videos to their websites.